This document: http://www.netaction.org/opensrc/future/oss-future.txt
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The Origins and Future of Open Source Software
A NetAction White Paper
By Nathan Newman
nathan@netaction.org
Contents:
* Introduction
* How Government Support Launched the Modern Computing Age
* How Free, Open Source Software Created the Internet
* Supervision and Standards
* UNIX As A Public Standard
* Breakdown of Open Computing on the Internet
* Why the Government Withdrew From Defense of Open Standards
* The Return of Open Source Computing
* Where to Go from Here--Ending the Microsoft Monopoly
* End Notes
NetAction Phone: (415) 775-8674
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Copyright 1999 by NetAction/The Tides Center. All rights reserved. Material
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In a world where Microsoft increasingly threatens to dominate computing and
the Internet, the strongest potential rival to its dominance is no longer
its traditional commercial rivals but, surprisingly, a seemingly motley
collection of free software tools and operating systems collectively dubbed
"open source" software. Unlike most commercial software, the core code of
such software can be easily studied by other programmers and improved
upon--the only proviso being that such improvements must also be revealed
publicly and distributed freely in a process that encourages continual
innovation.
From an operating system called Linux, named for a student from Finland who
wrote its core code, to a web server named Apache, put together as literally
"a patchy" set of updates to older software by a band of volunteer
programmers, these open source programs are emerging not just as inexpensive
but as more robust and dynamic alternatives to commercial software.
While this phenomenon surprises some analysts, it should not surprise those
with some sense of history. Open source software, largely funded by the
federal government, was the wellspring of the creation of the whole computer
industry and to this day still lies at the heart of how the Internet came
into being. Through a combination of key funding agencies, administrative
oversight of software standards and government purchasing rules, the federal
government had helped stimulate open source software and open standards for
decades. While such software never disappeared, its prominence was
undermined by the privatization of the Internet and the commercialization of
areas of software once dominated by open source options. Largely, this was
due to the fact that in the early 1990s, the federal government pulled back
from its commitment to open standards and support for open source software.
This left the way open for increases in proprietary, incompatible software
and for a company like Microsoft to seek to dominate the computing world
with its own proprietary standard.
If open source software is reemerging as an important force, it is largely
as a reaction against Microsoft itself. Competitors who themselves have seen
their own proprietary alternatives sink under the Microsoft steamroller have
suddenly seen alliances with open source software as a chance to halt the
Windows monopoly. By itself, this alliance is unlikely to make open source
software a real alternative to Microsoft and, more problematically, the
opportunism of the alliance creates a whole set of tensions that need to be
resolved for open source software to succeed.
What is needed is a revival of a federal government public policy that
supports open source computing and strong standards that can again support
the promise of open source innovation. This article will look at the past
history of the government's support for open source computing, examine the
lessons of its success and the results of its pullback in the early 1990s,
and use this history to outline a policy program for the future.
How Government Support Launched the Modern Computing Age[1]
One of the earliest threads that led to the Internet and the whole landscape
of post-World War II government support for computing began with an Atlantic
Monthly article right after the war by Vannevar Bush, a prominent MIT
researcher. In that article, he laid out a vision of collaborative science
and computing that would spark both economic and technological prominence
for America.
Under the psychological impact of Russia's Sputnik success in the 1950s,
Vannevar Bush's vision began to take shape as the government sought to
regularize its technological research and spending. Given the political
biases in the U.S. against government intervention, it seemed inevitable
that the engine for industrial policy would be defense-related--even highway
and education spending in the period was defined as "defense" to achieve
legislative passage.
However, President Eisenhower's personal experience in the military made him
distrustful of the bureaucratic interests in the Pentagon, which led him to
support the creation of new institutions largely independent of specific
military branches. One example was NASA, which ended up with much of the
day-to-day applied research of the military, while a new agency called the
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created to help coordinate
overall R&D spending. Early in the decade, the National Science Foundation
was created as a separate agency to fund non-military research, although it
would develop a close relationship with the science-based military agencies.
A key appointment at ARPA came in 1962 when psychologist J.C.R. Licklider
was hired to head a behavior sciences office, an office that would evolve
under Licklider's two-year directorship into the Information Processing
Techniques Office (IPTO) which would direct the original creation of the
Internet. Licklider in 1960 has written a manifesto for using computers to
enhance research and research collaboration called "Man-Computer Symbiosis"
and would define the IPTO's office's mandate in research funding. As
importantly, Licklider's university background encouraged him and his
successors to extend ARPA's funding to a range of university projects.
One key project was a $3 million per year grant to Project MAC at MIT to
encourage the spread of time-sharing computing on the then-breakthrough
minicomputer technology. ARPA would fund six of the first twelve
time-sharing computer systems in the country, which in turn would help spark
the whole minicomputer industry in the 1960s--crucial in the industry and
the Boston-area regional economy then but as crucial to the development of
the Internet over the next decades. Out of Project MAC would largely develop
the early ethos of software and hardware innovation--"hacking" in its early
non-pejorative sense before it became confused with electronic
vandalism--that launched the computer revolution. It was MIT hackers at
Project MAC who largely designed both hardware and software for DEC's
breakthrough PDP-6 timesharing minicomputer. They would spend endless hours
creating and sharing new software to extend its capabilities beyond the
expectations of its creators.
One of the most radical innovations was the SKETCHPAD program by Ivan
Sutherland which allowed the first graphic manipulation of computer images,
thereby allowing users to resize and manipulate pictures on the computer
screen. Ivan Sutherland would go on to run ARPA and would hire a NASA
engineer named Bob Taylor to run the IPTO office after Licklider. Both would
use their positions to further promote the creation of breakthrough
computing and encourage collaboration across the country.
A key part of this was funding for the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at
the Stanford Research Institute. ARC was run by an researcher Doug Engelbart
whose ideas on use of the computer as an aid to individual creativity
largely paralleled Licklider's. Taylor pushed through a multi million-dollar
grant for computers and staff for ARC's proposed "augmentation laboratory."
Out of ARC's lab would come an array of researchers who would go on to
become leaders of their own research teams at universities and commercial
R&D divisions across the country.
Engelbart worked from Sutherland's precedent to concentrate on using the
computer to manipulate text and ideas on the screen. Working with seventeen
colleagues and going through three rapid cycles of hardware revolution, by
1968 he was ready to publicly demonstrate the results at an engineering
conference called the ACM/IEEE Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
And the results stunned the audience.
Hooked up by microwave communication to the computers back at SRI, Engelbart
would demonstrate the array of tools developed at ARC: the first "mouse"
used as an input device, a windowing environment that could rapidly switch
between a menu of information sources and models of information, and word
processing on screen. None of these had ever been seen before and, in an age
when most programmers were still interacting with computers through punch
cards, the idea of word processing was a revelation[2]. What was
demonstrated was only the showiest example of a set of tools developed to
facilitate communication and shared information-based work among
intellectual collaborators. ARC was already using text-editing to share
common data through hypertext storage (the method of linked pages later used
in the World Wide Web) and ran an electronic mail communication system with
dedicated e-mail distribution lists among the researchers--all of this years
before these innovations would come to the ARPAnet. ARC would also pioneer
video-conferencing years before it was developed commercially.
What is startling about Engelbart's achievement, often ignored due to the
institutional liquidation of ARC, is how many of the conceptual computing
breakthroughs and initial implementations were achieved by his team. To name
just a few critical to the networked economy:
* Pioneering distributed electronic mail and e-mail lists five and seven
years before ARPAnet.
* Implementing word processing a decade before it began to appear in
offices.
* Designing the mouse as an input device sixteen years before Apple
introduced it to the world.
* Creating a windowing environment twenty years before Microsoft.
* Envisioning hypertext-linked documents in a distributed environment a
quarter-century before the World Wide Web.
All of this was paid for by the federal government due to the vision of
Licklider, Sutherland and Bob Taylor at ARPA. As importantly for Silicon
Valley, this federal investment would contribute to making the region a
magnet for new visionary talent and a wellspring of the networked economy.
How Free, Open Source Software Created the Internet
Out of Project MAC, ARC and other ARPA-funded institutions would emerge the
collaborative network that would shape the Internet and computing for the
next decades. When ARPA decided to network its various research outlets
around the country, it turned to a company called Bolt Beranek and Newman
(BNN), a Cambridge- based firm made up largely of MIT graduate students and
affiliated researchers (including J.C.R. Licklider at various times). BBN
would build the initial network computers needed for what was dubbed the
ARPANET while UCLA and ARC would take on administrative duties in managing
the network. Four initial "nodes" on the network were linked in October 1969
and by October 1972, when the ARPANET was first demonstrated publicly, there
were twenty-nine nodes in the network. What would evolve into the Internet
had been born.
ARPA would oversee the creation of an array of software needed to manage and
extend the computer network. The first set of standards, now known as the
"Request for Comments," or RFCs, was the work of the late Jonathan B.
Postel. The first standard network protocol was created in 1971 to allow a
person at one computer to connect to other computers on the network as if
they were local users. This soon evolved into the standard Transmission
Control Protocol (TCP) which was complemented in 1972 by the File Transfer
Protocol which allowed individual files to be exchanged between computers.
In 1976, ARPA hired Vint Cerf, a Stanford professor and an original member
of the UCLA graduate student group which helped launch the ARPANET, and Bob
Kahn, a former BBN manager on the project, to create a system for
integrating the ARPANET with other computer networks. By 1977, they had
demonstrated the Internet Protocol (IP) which could be used to integrate
satellite, packet radio and the ARPANET. From this point on, new networks of
computers could be easily added to the network. In 1981, ARPA funded
researchers at UC-Berkeley to include TCP/IP networking protocols into UCB's
popular version of the UNIX operating system, thereby spreading the Internet
standards to computers throughout the world.
An example of the cross-fertilization of staff and ideas outside the
government was the case of Bob Metcalfe and Ethernet. Bob Metcalfe had
originally designed the interface to connect MIT's computers to the ARPANET
and had been hired in the mid-1970s at Xerox Corporation's new Palo Alto
Research Center (PARC) which was headed by Bob Taylor, the former IPTO head
who had started the ARPANET project. Metcalfe was doing ARPA-funded work
while trying to figure out how to cheaply network PARC's experimental
personal computers. Using models from ARPA's project around radio packet
switching, Metcalfe created a system called Ethernet to exchange information
between computers in what would come to be called Local Area Networks
(LANs). Ethernet was crucial for the expansion of the Internet since local
computers could be networked together and then connected to other networks
using the TCP/IP protocol and local router computers. Xerox would start
selling Ethernet as a commercial product in 1980 (and Metcalfe would found
3Com to sell networking technology), while PARC head Bob Taylor donated
millions of dollars of Ethernet equipment to universities to help expand use
of networking on campuses.
In all these ways, ARPA helped shepherd open Internet standards into the
1980s and 1990s when they would be used to radically expand the network to a
wide range of users. In doing so, it was clear that the professional norms
promoted by ARPA and the community of researchers was critical in order to
keep individual profit-taking from undermining those open standards. As one
example, in 1973 then IPTO head Larry Roberts was hired by BBN to run a
company subsidiary called TELENET that would run private packet switching
networks. In coming to BBN, Roberts carefully deflected a bid by BBN to take
over ARPANET privately. J.C.R. Licklider, who returned from MIT to ARPA to
replace Roberts as head of IPTO, soon found himself in conflict with his old
employer, BBN, which was refusing to publish the original computer code for
the IMP computer routers which the company had designed. Making matters
worse, BBN was becoming more and more reluctant itself to fix software bugs
faced by the system (no doubt preferring to concentrate on programming for
its for-profit TELENET subsidiary). Licklider, in the name of the openness
of the Net, threatened to hold up BBN's federal contract funds unless the
company released the code publicly. BBN did so, thereby enhancing--albeit
reluctantly--the tradition of open codes in the development of standards.
A key part of the success of the Internet was the fact that the public space
of the network harnessed the energy of universities, both paid staff and
volunteers, to provide a continuous stream of open source software to
improve its functionality. The Net itself allowed any new innovation to
nearly instantaneously ricochet across the nation, even the world, without
the friction of the costs of either distribution or purchase. This "gift"
economy allowed new innovations to be quickly tested and to gain a critical
mass of users for functions which had not even been envisioned by the
creators of the system.
The ethic of shared, open software, what was called the "hacker ethic[3],"
at MIT's Project Mac, would contribute to both the creation of the Internet
and the spread of computing across the country. Many early efforts were
games like Spacewar and Adventure, but more serious software became the
staples of day-to-day computing throughout the Internet and beyond. Probably
the most pervasive example was the early use of the ARPANET for electronic
mail. Not even planned as part of its design, email was created as a private
"hack" by BBN engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1972 as a piggyback on the file
transfer protocol. Under the tolerant supervision of ARPA, use of the Net
for email communication soon surpassed computing resource sharing. Stephen
Lukasik, ARPA director from 1971 to 1975, saw the importance of email for
long-distance collaboration and himself soon began virtually directing ARPA
from electronic mail and his 20-lb Texas Instruments portable terminal.
Partly because of Lukasik's own frustration in dealing with the stream of
raw mail, IPTO director Larry Roberts himself wrote the code for the first
mail manager software, called READ. This was soon supplanted by the popular
MSG, which added the first reply function. New free email managers have been
a staple of Internet innovation ever since. Eric Allman, a student at
UC-Berkeley, would create the program SENDMAIL to assist network managers in
directing and processing this ever increasing email traffic--to this day,
Allman's program is used to direct over 75% of Internet email traffic.
Others at Berkeley created the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND) program
which is used to direct traffic to sites by the site name--like
www.netaction.org--rather than having to use numbers like 199.201.243.200.
While free and open source software continued to enhance the spread of
computer networking, what ultimately brought the Internet into its own was
the "Gopher" software developed at the University of Minnesota in the early
1990s. Building on the existence of individual Internet sites where files
and programs could be retrieved after logging into a particular computer
over the network, Gopher was a piece of software that could be used to
create personalized lists of files from computers all over the Net and allow
computer users to view or retrieve any file chosen from the list. With this
innovation, the Internet became one giant hard drive that could be organized
and presented to a particular set of users in whatever way made the most
logical or aesthetic sense. Gophers sprang up on computers run by
governments, universities, community organizations and businesses which were
beginning to stake a place on the Net. In a visual way, the Internet's vast
resources could be presented and reached through Minnesota's "All the Gopher
Sites in the World" gopher site. For most commercial users of service
providers like America Online, gophers were the user's initial contact with
the world of the Internet, and this contact created demand for even more of
the content that users knew existed out of the proprietary walls of those
commercial providers.
The next step, and the step that brought the Internet into almost daily
headlines, was the World Wide Web. The Web was initially designed at the
European Particle Physics Lab (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland to share
information internally--what would be designated as an Intranet today.
However, people quickly saw it as a useful way of sharing information
between computer systems much like the Gopher software, with the additional
advantage of "hypertext" connections to internal parts of documents. In
1993, computer science students funded at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications located at the University of Illinois created
Mosaic, the first Web browser that added the display of graphics to the
traditional text display. With an almost unnerving speed, Web sites exploded
across the Internet along with the browsers needed to view them. It was only
with Netscape's creation of its Navigator software, followed soon by
Microsoft's Explorer software, that secret code and commercial software
began to erode the open source tradition of the Internet--an issue we will
return to later in this paper.
Supervision and Standards
If government funding helped support new software as a font of innovation on
the Internet, government supervision helped maintain the standardization
required for easy compatibility between the wide range of computers
increasingly sharing resources on the Net. Despite odes to the "anarchy" of
the Internet, its creation was a closely supervised anarchy directed to the
specifications of government, yet marshaling the broad professional,
volunteer and eventually commercial resources of the emerging computer
elite. In many ways, the very skill of the government in marshaling those
resources with a light hand is a source of the sometimes rhetorical amnesia
over its role. The smoothness of the Internet's creation and the building of
a broad consensus over its shape created so much legitimacy for its design
that it was seen less as a creation of "the government"--i.e. "them"--and
more as a creation of society as a whole.
Licklider had actually started this professional network at ARPA in the
early 1960s when he reached beyond traditional experts at federal agencies
and national labs to gather an association of experts interested in
communication technology. He oriented ARPA to establish contacts with
university researchers around the country, establishing what he presciently
called the Intergalactic Computer Network which helped connect researchers
interested in computer networking.
When ARPANET was created, UCLA was funded to establish a Network Measurement
Center to oversee the evolution of the network. Forty grad students at UCLA,
many of them to become key leaders in both the public and corporate Internet
world, helped run the center and coordinate with other researchers around
developing the standards for running the ARPANET. The new technology itself
helped add a whole nationwide group of researchers and graduate students in
these deliberations to help mold the evolution of the Internet. This
national body became the Network Working Group (NWG) which was expanded
after the 1972 "debut" conference to become part of an International Network
Working Group to promote international computer networking.
Management of Internet "addresses," critical for the decentralized
electronic switching network, would be housed at Doug Engelbart's shop at
the Stanford Research Institute in an institution called the InterNIC. As
the NIC, Engelbart would help identify and organize electronic resources on
the Internet for the easiest retrieval. Until 1992 (when the NIC functions
were awarded to other companies), the function of the NIC at SRI would
include administration in assigning IP network addresses and domain names
for all servers, essentially creating the yellow pages for the Internet.[4]
Surveying the initial implementation of the ARPAnet in a speech in 1970,
Engelbart could already envision the evolution of the networked community
where, "there will emerge a new 'marketplace,' representing fantastic wealth
in commodities of knowledge, service, information, processing, storage,
etc."[5]
ARPA would replace the NWG by a more formal Internet Configuration Control
Board (ICCB) in 1979 to extend participation in the design of the Internet
to a wider range of members of the research community. This was especially
important as the ARPANET expanded to include a range of other government
agencies and bodies and evolved into the diversity of the emerging Internet
community. The ICCB was later replaced by the Internet Activities Board
(IAB) which used a set of ten task forces to include a wide range of experts
in the evolution of the Internet. As the Internet was privatized in the
early 1990s, the private sector (led in many cases by former researchers for
ARPA and its Internet-related funded projects) created the Internet Society
in 1992, and the IAB reconstituted itself as the Internet Architecture Board
and joined the Internet Society.[6]
At each step of its development, ARPA and associated government agencies
expanded participation to an ever widening set of experts and technological
leaders who, in turn, would encourage others in their academic, scientific,
community or business realm to support the effective development of the
Internet. As well, the continual movement of personnel back and forth from
academic, government and (eventually) business positions created a
cross-fertilization of ideas and a loyalty to the emerging network rather
than to any particular organization.
It was the weakening of this government-supervised network of standards in
the 1990s that allowed commercial competition over standards to undermine
open computing, setting the stage for both the Netscape-Microsoft browser
war and for Microsoft's overall expanding monopoly on standards (issues we
will return to later).
UNIX as a Public Standard
If anything illustrates both the gains from government support of open
standards in computing and the dangers from public policy withdrawing from
that support, it is the UNIX operating system.
UNIX was the first operating system developed that was independent of
specific hardware, thereby giving users and programmers freedom from the
dictates of hardware designers. UNIX could be "ported" to different
machines, thereby allowing the same program to run on completely different
hardware. Created at Bell Labs in the late 60s when AT&T was still barred
from the computer business, UNIX was widely licensed by AT&T, mostly to
universities. UNIX was especially popular with ARPANET programmers working
on a wide variety of computers because they needed to create an integrated
set of software tools for managing their emerging network.
UNIX had developed during the 1970s into a number of lackluster variations,
so in the late 1970s, UC-Berkeley researchers--funded largely by
ARPA--developed an improved version that was dubbed UNIX 4.1 BSD (Berkeley
Software Distribution). Bill Joy, the lead programmer in the Berkeley UNIX
effort, was again funded by ARPA in 1981 to create a new version of UNIX
including TCP/IP networking protocols. With a minimal licensing fee,
Berkeley seeded its UNIX version with its Internet protocols throughout the
university world.
Probably no single private company benefitted more from (and contributed
more to) the open UNIX and Internet standards than Sun Microsystems, a
seller in the early 1980s of new high performance machines dubbed
workstations. Sun would enter, then dominate, the market for stand-alone
workstations that were beginning to replace time-share minicomputers.
Started in 1982, Sun would be one of the fastest growing companies in
history, making the Fortune 500 within five years. By 1995, the company
would sell 1.5 million high performance computers, used as the core systems
for networking in government, universities, finance and engineering. And
from the first day of operation, every Sun computer was shipped with UNIX
with hardware and software designed to be hooked up to the Internet. It was
on Sun UNIX machines that much of the Internet would be networked in the
1980s, and it was on Sun Workstations that the first Web browser, Mosaic,
would be designed.
That Sun was committed to open standards reflected the company founders'
emergence out of the milieu of Bay Area graduate students immersed in the
ARPANET. When Stanford M.B.A.'s Scott McNealy and Vinod Khlosa teamed up
with Stanford student Andy Bechtolsheim, who had developed a new high
performance computer using off-the-shelf components, it was natural for them
to adopt UNIX, the popular university operating system, as the operating
system for their new computer. And it was natural for them to bring in as a
co-founder Bill Joy, the premiere UNIX and ARPAnet programmer at
UC-Berkeley.
Commercial versions of UNIX, however, were splintered between various
incompatible proprietary versions. Far from being a widely used standard in
business that Sun could just hop a ride on, Bill Joy and the Sun team had to
help build a standard and sell private industry on the gospel of open
computing. They took a number of steps to ensure that the BSD UNIX on Sun's
computers was seen as a real standard. Sun gave away the BSD UNIX and TCP/IP
networking software with every computer they sold. When Sun develop a
Network File System (NFS) in 1984 that enhanced network computing by making
it possible to share files between different computers, they didn't try to
sell this advance as normal software. Instead, they licensed it to the
industry for a nominal licensing fee and even published the specifications
for the software on the usenet electronic bulletin board so anyone could
construct an alternative to the NFS file system if they wanted to avoid the
license fee. Usable on DOS, VMS and other operating systems, it was a key
advance for networking and increased trust by customers that Sun would be an
honest guardian of the open standards it was promoting on its hardware.
Another key step was made in 1985 when Sun approached AT&T, allowed back in
the computer industry, and worked out an agreement to merge Sun's Berkeley
UNIX with AT&T's System V, further enhancing the public view of Sun's UNIX
as the standard.
The key for making UNIX nearly universal in corporate and high-end computing
in the late 1980s, though, was decisive action by the federal government in
support of strong UNIX standards. The federal government itself was faced
with a mess of different computer systems that needed to be networked
together. Because of the close ties of the Department of Defense to
university researchers (largely fostered by ARPA/DARPA), the federal
government already had an affinity for UNIX. So in 1986, the government
passed regulations that no company could bid on any government computer
contract unless their system offered UNIX as an option. This gave Sun a huge
advantage in securing a large slice of the $500 million, five-year National
Security Agency contract then under bid. Sun's and AT&T's version of UNIX
was now the benchmark for selling to the government and university markets
(along with many private industry customers who would follow the
government's lead in standards). This was reinforced in 1988 when the Air
Force declared DEC's proprietary version of UNIX, called Ultrix, ineligible
for government contracts.
Other workstation and corporate computer makers would do a complete
turnaround in 1987 and 1988 and begin promoting their own "open computing"
UNIX systems--all with the built-in Internet protocols that would set the
stage for the commercial explosion of the Internet in the 1990s.
Unfortunately, this was also the period of government withdrawal from strong
support for computing standards and the result was the development of
different UNIX standards, as Sun, Hewlett Packard and other companies lined
up behind different variants in commercial warfare. This fragmentation of
UNIX standards was soon mirrored in the war between Netscape and Microsoft
over Internet standards that followed the government's withdrawal from
defense of those standards.
Breakdown of Open Computing on the Internet
It was with the World Wide Web that the Internet broke into national
consciousness and where Netscape Communications would become the central Bay
Area firm around which a slew of new Silicon Valley companies would form.
But unlike Sun, which rode public UNIX standards to rapid growth, Netscape
began its life with a direct assault on the original government-based
standards created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA). In this, Netscape would play a three-cornered game against both the
NCSA and Microsoft, who it knew would quickly be coming in with its own
controlled standards. Netscape's success would be based on the virtual
withdrawal of the government from any serious intervention on behalf of
Internet standards.
The initial Web "browser," Mosaic, was created at the University of Illinois
at Champaign-Urbana where the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) was located. The National Science Foundation had
officially funded the NSFnet "backbone" of the Internet to link five major
supercomputing centers, including NCSA, and NCSA's software development
group had concentrated for years on high-performance information-sharing and
collaboration software. Even before Mosaic, the NCSA had back in 1985
created software "clients" for PCS and Macs, called Telnet, to allow people
to access and use computers connected to the Internet as if the user were
locally based. A different computer center at Illinois was responsible, as
well, for the popular Eudora client for electronic mail on PCs and Macs. The
NCSA had worked to create a graphics-based collaborative tool for sharing
documents called Collage, so it was natural for them to create a team to
develop a graphics-based version of the Web "HyperText Markup Language"
(HTML) protocols created by CERN in Europe.[7] The result of this
forty-member team was Mosaic, first introduced on the UNIX platform in
January 1993, with Macintosh and PC versions introduced in August 1993.
Copyrighted by the University of Illinois, Mosaic could be downloaded for
free by individuals and by companies wishing to use the Internet for
internal communications.
However, the NCSA did not want to become a help desk for commercial
applications, so in August 1994, the University of Illinois assigned future
commercial rights for licensing NCSA Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc., a local
company created by NCSA alumni to commercialize NCSA technology. The goal
was for university researchers to continue developing longer-term technology
and standards to be incorporated into browsers, while Spyglass would help
license the technology to companies addressing immediate customer needs such
as support, speed, and security. Spyglass began widely licensing Mosaic to
computer companies including IBM, DEC, AT&T, NEC, and Firefox Inc., who was
working to integrate Mosaic standards into Novell networking software for
the personal computer.[8]
Watching Mosaic from the Bay Area, Silicon Graphics CEO Jim Clark, a veteran
of the UNIX standards wars, understood how much money could be won if a
company could take control of the standards of this new Internet tool. So
Clark left his company and set out to destroy Mosaic and replace its
government-backed standards. He met with Marc Andreesen, a member of the
Mosaic team who had been hired at a Bay Area Internet security firm called
Enterprise Integration Technologies. Out of that meeting in April 1994 was
born Mosaic Communications Corporation (later to be called Netscape). With
Clark putting up the capital, Andreesen recruited five other Mosaic team
members from NCSA to design what they called in-house Mozilla, the
Mosaic-Killer. In six months, Clark's team had created a powerful browser,
which the team called Netscape. It had easy-to-navigate features and loaded
graphic images faster than NCSA's Mosaic. But Netscape did something
else--it included the ability to display text formatting that did not even
exist in the HTML standards embedded in the NCSA Mosaic browser. This meant
that Web pages designed to work with Netscape would not be readable by all
the other Mosaic-based browsers. This would encourage people to use Netscape
browsers and, as Netscape developed them, would encourage Web designers to
pay Netscape for the server software that developed Web pages using their
modified standards. It was in this later market of selling Web design tools
costing from $1,500 to $50,000 where Netscape intended to make their
money.[9]
And then Clark and Andreesen compounded their fracturing of the NCSA
standard by giving their version away over the Internet. The University of
Illinois had demanded that Clark's company pay for a license before selling
their version. Clark later said that he refused because the university was
demanding an ongoing per-copy royalty: "I didn't tell them, but we had
intended to allow people to download it, and they were going to charge me.
The amount varied, but nothing is innocuous when you're talking tens of
millions of people."[10] The point of the licenses by Illinois had been,
along with collecting a little revenue, to control the standards and make
sure that the only free version available was the official NCSA standard.
Netscape would essentially "dump" its version onto the Internet, thereby
undercutting the rest of the commercial browser companies, which couldn't
duplicate Netscape's actions because they were fairly paying per copy
license fees. So Netscape, being the sole enhanced commercial browser
flooding the Internet, was able to destroy NCSA-led standards and take over
standards creation itself.
Unlike the situation with Sun Microsystems, where the government would
decisively support open government-based UNIX standards, the federal
government did nothing to support NCSA's standards. Other companies and
analysts would immediately condemn Netscape's actions as a monopolistic
move[11], but the government made no investigations into possible monopoly
practices, no lawsuit alleging intellectual property infringement, no
announcements that the federal government would use only NCSA-approved codes
in government Web sites, no announcements that it would refuse to buy any
Web servers (i.e. Netscape's) based on such non-standard formatting, and no
signal from the government at all that they would oppose Netscape's takeover
of the standards. Instead, the University of Illinois, after a bit of public
grumbling, threw in the towel. They signed an agreement with Clark in
December 1994 that allowed Netscape to be sold without a license for the
minor concessions that the words "Mosaic" be removed from the firm's title
and that no mention of Mosaic be made in marketing the browser.[12]
In a perverse way, Clark and Netscape would justify their destruction of the
government standards based on the expected weakness of the government in
defending them. They predicted that Microsoft would soon use its
dissemination of the operating system to take control of standards if
Netscape didn't do so first through free distribution. Argued Clark:
At some level, standards certainly play a role, but the real issue
is that there is a set of people, a set of very powerful companies
out there, who don't play the standards game. For the standards
game to work, everyone has to play it, everyone has to acknowledge
it's the game. Companies such as Microsoft aren't going to sit
around and wait for some standards body to tell them. If your
philosophy is to adhere to the standards, the guy who just does
the de facto thing that serves the market need instantly has got
an advantage.[13]
Netscape, having seized leadership of Web standards, would try to redeem its
reputation by working with the old Internet fellowship of engineers embodied
in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the more recent World-Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) based at MIT and run by CERN's Tim Berners-Lee, who
came to MIT in late 1994.
And as Microsoft entered the game with its own Internet Explorer browser to
appear on every Windows desktop, the grumblings over Netscape's occasional
forays into proprietary advantage would lessen as the alternative fear of
Microsoft taking over the whole computing world loomed. Having come late to
the Internet, Microsoft initially directly licensed Mosaic browser
technology from Spyglass in December 1994--a license netting Spyglass about
$13.1 million. But when Microsoft began giving its browser away at the end
of 1995, the rest of Spyglass's licensing revenue (amounting to $20 million)
disappeared as the browser war settled into a two-company fight between
Netscape and Microsoft.[14]
In the end, Netscape would argue that the beloved public village of
standards was threatened by Microsoft, and Netscape had only destroyed the
village in order to try to save it. With the government withdrawing from its
role in defending standards, such a standards war was inevitable.
Why the Government Withdrew from Defense of Open Standards
So why the withdrawal by the government in the first place? The retreat of
federal involvement has been based on a combination of ideological
opposition, private industry desires, and the disappearance of a stable
government bureaucracy able to assume the role of regulator. This has left
Internet development increasingly in the hands of self-interested companies
seeking commercial advantage rather than maximum innovation and
compatibility for consumers.
The ideological assault on federal involvement in further developments of
the Internet is strongly related to the end of the Cold War and the
withdrawal of the "national security" basis for much of the federal
government's economic involvement since World War II. It was probably not a
coincidence that ARPA director Craig Fields, criticized for ARPA's
involvement in trying to direct the development of high technology, was
fired by the Bush Administration in 1989--the same year as the fall of the
Berlin Wall. While the Clinton administration made some gestures in
asserting a public interest in the development of what they called the
National Information Infrastructure, privatization proceeded apace. What
limited funds the Clinton Administration allocated for encouraging community
and local government development of the Internet was vociferously opposed by
conservatives in Congress and, with the Republican takeover of the Congress
in 1994, those funds were initially zeroed out and in the end sharply
limited, even as local need for the funds exploded with the expansion of the
Net.
As for Internet standards, criticism had already been leveled against the
University of Illinois and NCSA for attempting to manage the expansion of
the World Wide Web[15] and, in the context of Newt Gingrich's anti-
government message, there was probably even less support for government
regulation of standards.
Private industry had significantly benefited from government spending on the
Internet in the period when it was not commercially viable and the
government was the main market for Internet-related computer services.
However, as a private market for Internet services appeared around the
structure of the Internet, private industry has seen strong government
involvement as a threat to corporate control of information markets.
Companies that had started life as extensions of the government saw the
opportunity for independence and extremely high profits as the government's
role receded. The success of government intervention in nurturing new
economic sectors is often rewarded by the creation of a private sector
interest in blocking further government action.
Similarly, the success of the private sector helped fragment and undermine
the ability of key government agencies to successfully promote the public's
interest. Partly, this is due to ideological opposition from business, which
politically sought to curtail the power of the public sector as the private
sector expanded commercially. With Defense involvement in high technology
under assault, and Republicans trying to abolish the Commerce Department
where most of the NII programs have been coordinated in the Clinton
administration, there has been little chance to consider the long-term
potential for public servants watching their political backs.[16] Also
significant was the movement of ARPA employees from public service to
private companies now pushing for limiting the federal role. From Bob
Metcalfe, who became rich through founding 3Com, to Vint Cerf, who has
become a major spokesperson for MCI, the founders of ARPANET who initially
cultivated the ethic of freely sharing information and software are now
fighting for profit share and private ownership of intellectual property.
The Return of Open Source Computing
So in the midst of UNIX wars, browser wars and commercial competition, the
emergence of open source software as a more and more accepted part of the
computing environment comes as something of a surprise. The catalyst is
Microsoft, or rather the reaction of Microsoft's Silicon Valley competitors
to the Seattle-based company's monopolistic practices. The problem for
Silicon Valley firms, despite the pride in the geography-driven technology
innovation of the region, is that such proximity does not automatically
create the standards that propel economic growth, especially in the absence
of a firm alliance with government. Technology firms have tried to create
substitutes for government through private consortia like CommerceNet and
other standards bodies, but none have the core of public-interested
officials that government can wield to transcend particularistic company
concerns in favor of the public interest.
The reality is that despite the Internet's success, many of the firms in the
region continually struggle with the danger of proprietary technologies
upsetting the trust needed to sustain the collaborative model that has
fueled the growth of firms in the region. At the top of the list of dangers
is of, course, Microsoft. Microsoft used a combination of its early alliance
with IBM and hardball tactics to build its proprietary operating system
monopoly on the desktop. From that base, Microsoft would extend its
proprietary standards into the market for large-scale business computing,
formerly the province of mainframes or UNIX-based network servers. While the
Internet at first appeared as a danger to Microsoft, even a dagger at its
throat, Microsoft also saw that success in molding those standards in a
proprietary direction could extend the company's control throughout the
whole world of corporate computing.
Microsoft responded with a combination of in-house software applications and
developer tools optimized for its proprietary standards, creating an
all-pervasive computing environment that promised any corporation that its
needs would be met. The Microsoft solution might be less innovative than any
particular competitor, but Microsoft's very completeness and pervasiveness
across all sectors of computing would make up for its rigidity.
In fact, Microsoft's rigidity could be an advantage when compared to the
weak standards that pervaded the UNIX corporate environment by the 1990s.
After the heyday of the 80s when government purchasing requirements had
enforced a broad UNIX standard on the industry, the industry had divided
into warring UNIX camps and left customers uncertain that their needs would
be met in the fragmented UNIX environment. By 1997 Microsoft NT computer
servers were outselling UNIX servers.[17] It was clear that in the absence
of strong standards and government support for such standards, proprietary
models had a decided advantage in yielding the market stability and monopoly
rents that a company like Microsoft could reap.
Even as Silicon Valley firms sought to finesse innovation from the economic
pressure of Windows competition, the UNIX wars made clear that strong open
standards were the key to the region competing economically against
proprietary steamrollers like Microsoft. Consortia like CommerceNet built
around Internet standards were the first step in the process, but companies
like Sun and Netscape saw the need for broader solutions that would expand
open standards from the operating system to the tools used by programmers.
The Java language, with its promise that any program would be able to run on
any computer, no matter its hardware or operating system, became a part of
that strategy.
With the need to generate stronger global support for its standards,
Netscape took the unprecedented step in March 1998 of publicly revealing its
browser source code--the usually top-secret guts of any program. Netscape
invited developers to modify the code and even resell their own version as
long as any modifications to the code were republished publicly and made
according to the terms of their license, and subject to coordination by the
development team at Mozilla.org. Faced with the onslaught of Microsoft's
proprietary approach, Netscape decided that the regional commercial
commitment to developing standards was insufficient. It needed to marshal
the resources of the global programming community, and it needed to open its
code to gain the kind of trust needed to ensure their support.
The idea, harking back to the original ARPANET vision, was to invite the
participation of the whole Net community in developing the tools and
standards embedded in the browser software. "It's no longer Netscape alone,
pushing the client software forward, but now it's really the whole Net,"
said Bob Lisbonne, Netscape's senior vice president for client products at
the time. "For Netscape, this gives us a way to engage the creative,
innovative abilities of literally orders of magnitude more people than we
could ever--really any commercial software company could ever afford to just
put on their payroll.[18]" With hacker enthusiasts lauding the decision,
thousands of developers would download the source code within the first day
and major modifications of Navigator were released onto the Net within weeks
by independent developers from all over the country. The idea was that
Netscape could release existing modifications in its continual upgrades of
both browser and server software. What it lost by giving up control of its
code, it would make up through selling customized business versions and
server software, and by preventing Microsoft's control of standards which
would be Netscape's deathnell.
Netscape's action highlights the continued importance of
public-interest-oriented software development. This type of software has
survived much of the privatization of the Internet. Most dramatically,
despite the focus on the Microsoft-Netscape rivalry, the most popular Web
server on the Internet was neither company's but rather a free, open source
server called Apache. After the NCSA developed its Mosaic browser software
and its original server software, the NSCA as part of the government
privatization had ceased aggressively updating its software. Instead, a
geographically dispersed group of software programmers, some at universities
and some in private business, began collaborating in 1995 to update the NCSA
server to increase its power and manageability. Most of the programmers
participated out of altruism. The result was a Web server that in 1997 was
used in 44 percent of Internet sites, compared to just 16 percent that used
Microsoft and 12 percent using Netscape's software. And that list of sites
included McDonalds, UUNET Technologies, HotWired, Yahoo Inc., CSB, the FBI
and IBM, which passed over its own Lotus Domino server in favor of Apache
when it put its "Big Blue-Gary Kasparov" chess match on the Internet.[19]
Similarly, one of the favorite Web programming languages is a free and open
language named perl which has similarly been modified and improved through a
global network of collaborators coordinated by programmer Larry Wall.
Netscape also announced that it would begin making all its software
applications available in the Linux operating system, a freeware version of
UNIX that has become the fastest expanding operating system in the world
with three to nine million copies on computers around the world. Linux was
described by Wired magazine in 1997 as "[Window] NT's most serious
competitor, the only viable alternative to the Microsoft monoculture."[20]
Remarkably, Linux was born in 1991 by a student at the University of
Helsinki in Finland whose first name, Linus, led to the naming of the
language. At that point, a whole series of free and open source UNIX tools
had been developed by programmers connected to GNU (a self-referencing title
standing for GNU is Not Unix) foundation, itself founded by one of the
original MIT hackers, Richard Stallman, who objected to the increasing
commercialization of university research. Stallman and his fellow GNU
hackers had, rightly, feared that despite the fact that popular UNIX
standards like Sun's were broadly distributed, they still remained under
private ownership and could and would be used for proprietary advantage
under the right (or wrong) circumstances. Which is what happened by the
early 90s.
The community of GNU programmers and users sought a non-proprietary UNIX
alternative to escape the new UNIX standards wars between competing
commercial providers. What this network of free software developers lacked
was the core of the operating system, called a "kernel," which would tie all
the GNU UNIX tools together into an alternative to the commercial UNIX
competitors. Linus Torvalds wrote that kernel and from his university post
would use the Internet to coordinate improvements in this new operating
system with help from hundreds of enthusiasts around the globe.
Based on what GNU called "copyleft" principles, the Linux operating system
could be distributed freely or packaged with documentation and sold for
modest amounts backed by technical support by companies like Red Hat,
Caldera and Cygnus Solutions. Extremely popular in developing nations like
South Africa, Cuba, India and the Philippines, Linux also began to eclipse
other forms of UNIX in the U.S. partly because of its price but also because
many people considered it technically the best operating system in
existence. Linux was the first operating system to include Java capability,
so every increase in Java programs adds to its functionality.[21]
Netscape's source code unveiling, and its announced support for Linux,
throws into relief the different economies of trust that separate
proprietary standards and open source standards. With proprietary standards
like Microsoft's, everyone trusts (or fears) that Microsoft will enforce
whatever standards it dictates from its company-specific development. The
result is that hardware and software partners on such proprietary efforts
develop products anywhere to their uniform standard. Alternatively,
collaborators on open source software can increasingly use the Internet to
build trust based on altruism and the hacker ethic of achievement without
needing to share any geography--the extreme example being Linus Torvalds
direction of the evolution of Linux. Without expectation of financially
capturing the social benefits of their creation, they are free to innovate
without restriction. On the other hand, with more diffuse commercial
standards, collaborators need the repeated interactions and day-to-day
commercial interactions of shared geography, like Silicon Valley, to
generate financial gain while assuring that multiple collaborators all
profit from innovation.
With Microsoft's proprietary approaches gaining ground, Netscape and other
Silicon Valley actors reluctantly saw their alternative commercial standards
losing ground and saw an alliance with the global open source software model
as necessary for survival. They would forgo some profits in order to
maintain the priority on innovation that gives them an advantage in the
remaining commercial aspects of technology development.
A range of new partners to Linux and other open source software have
emerged. Corel--maker of the WordPerfect wordprocessor--announced it would
be releasing a full suite of office applications for Linux. Inprise
(formerly Borland) announced that its Interbase database server would be
ported to Linux. IBM announced that its next set of Web tools, called
WebSphere Application Server, would fully support the Apache web server. IBM
also announced it would join the Apache Group of collaborative developers
and be contributing code to improve the Apache server. Sendmail creator Eric
Allman has created a startup business to sell easy-to-use administrative
tools to support the core free Sendmail program. Hewlett-Packard, Compaq,
IBM, and Silicon Graphics have all indicated plans to install and support
Linux for their hardware customers. Lotus will release a version of its
Domino and Notes collaborative software for Linux later in 1999.
Where to Go from Here--Ending the Microsoft Monopoly
So with all this good news, open source software might seem to be an
antidote to the threat of Microsoft's monopoly. At least that was the
argument Microsoft executives were making in court in January. Of course,
even Microsoft's in-house political magazine, Slate, noted the irony that
everything the executives described about "Windows' impending obsolescence
and its rivals' virtues [was] exactly the opposite of what Microsoft tells
consumers and corporate clients."[22]
Microsoft may play up the marginal danger of Linux to its market share, but
the sobering reality is that Microsoft server sales are still growing faster
than the overall market growth-- increasing Microsoft's market share. Linux
is growing, but mostly at the expense of commercial versions of UNIX, whose
growth has essentially dropped to a standstill of only 4% in 1998. And
neither Linux nor a rejuvenated Apple is undermining Microsoft's complete
domination of the desktop market.
While many of Microsoft's competitors are collaborating in support of Linux,
they are just as likely--especially with a little Microsoft incentive--to
fall out into competing camps that might easily divert Linux or other open
source software into a competing muddle of standards. Just as the UNIX wars
served Microsoft, a similar split in the future could easily knock Linux out
as a strong competitor to the centrally-controlled standards of Windows.
However, the limited success of Linux and other open source software does
have implications for the Microsoft antitrust trial. The availability of
open source software is not an excuse to find Microsoft innocent of the
wholesale monopolistic abuses that the trial has exposed. But it may become
one of the remedies that the court and other government agencies use to rein
in Microsoft's monopoly power.
Many, including NetAction, have proposed remedies to Microsoft's monopoly
abuses, from breaking up the company into multiple competing units to
court-ordered limits on its licensing agreements to forcing Microsoft to
reveal its source code to prevent in-house coders from having advantages
over competitors in non-OS markets.
While such government restrictions are likely necessary, none of them speak
to the issue of creating a strong viable alternative to Microsoft. As Mitch
Stoltz notes in "The Case for Government Promotion of Open Source Software,"
the federal government already spends billions of dollars on software
research, purchases and implementation. If it marshaled those resources in
support of open source solutions, it would achieve not only many of the
clear advantages open source software delivers but would undermine the
Microsoft monopoly at the same time. If the government demands uniform
standards for Linux and other open source software for government purchases,
this will go a long way toward preventing fragmentation of standards
throughout the open source universe.
Many critics of the Microsoft suit raise reasonable concerns that a purely
negative, restrictive approach to punishing Microsoft might inhibit
innovation at the company without necessarily creating a viable competitor.
Promoting open source software is the positive policy option that the
government should employ to encourage the sort of innovation and competition
that is needed to truly end the Microsoft monopoly.
End Notes
1. The history in this chapter derives from a wide range of sources
detailed in the bibliography but an invaluable source is: Hafner, Katie
and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the
Internet. Simon & Shuster, New York. 1996 along with Rheingold, Howard.
Tools for Thought--The People and Ideas Behind the Next Computer
Revolution. Simon & Shuster. New York. 1985. Other sources used
include: Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
Anchor Press. Garden City, New York. 1984; Vinton G. Cerf. "Computer
Networking: Global Infrastructure for the 21st Century." Copyright 1995
by Vinton G. Cerf and the Computing Research Association. On the
Internet at
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lazowska/cra/networks.html. Hardy,
Henry Edward. The History of the Net. Master's Thesis. School of
Communications, Grand Valley State University. September 28, 1993;
Zakon, Robert Hobbes'. "Hobbes' Internet Timeline v2.5.
http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html. 1993-6
2. Saffo, Paul. "Racing change on a merry-go-round: MIT Management in the
Nineties" program reports industry overall is not more productive
because of computing technology." Personal Computing v14, n5 (May 25,
1990):67. Saffo details the revolutionary vision of Engelbart and how
little modern business has engaged with the full thrust of Engelbart's
vision.
3. The term "hacker" was originally a descriptive term which implied a
shared belief that technical information should, in principle, be
freely available to all users. While some individuals who promoted this
perspective are still actively involved in Internet development, the
term has a different meaning to the current generation of Internet
users.
4. Baker, Steven. "The evolving Internet backbone--history of the Internet
computer network." UNIX Review v11, n9 (Sept, 1993):15.
5. Rheingold, 1985, p. 199.
6. There is a more extensive history of this evolution of professional
governance of the Internet in: Kahn, Robert E. "The role of government
in the evolution of the Internet." Communications of the ACM v37, n8
(Aug 1994):15-19.
7. Michalski, Jerry. "O pioneers!". RELease 1.0 v94, n1 (Jan 31, 1994):5
(8 pages).
8. Stevens, Tim. "NCSA: National Center for Supercomputing Applications."
Industry Week v243, n23 (Dec 19, 1994):56-58 and Patch, Kimberly.
"Spyglass takes on Mosaic licensing: will focus on support and
security." PC Week v11, n34 (August 29, 1994):123.
9. Accounts of Netscape's startup from: Holzinger, Albert G. "Netscape
founder points, and it clicks." Nation's Business v84, n1 (Jan
1996):32; Nee, Eric."Jim Clark." Upside v7, n10 (Oct 1995):28-48.
10. Nee, Oct 1995.
11. Steinert-Threlkeld, Tom. "The Internet shouldn't be a breeding ground
for monopolies--Mosaic Communications' NetScape giveaway could be
prelude to market dominance." InterActive Week v1, n2 (Nov 7, 1994):44.
12. "University of Illinois and Netscape Communications reach agreement."
Information Today v12, n3 (Mar 1995):39.
13. Nee, ibid. 1995
14. Lohr, Steve. "Spyglass, a Pioneer, Learns Hard Lessons About Microsoft"
New York Times. March 2. 1998.
15. Messmer, Ellen. "Spyglass captures Mosaic licensing." Network World
v11, n35 (Aug 29, 1994):4.
16. See Hellerstein, Judith. "The NTIA needs to rethink its role in the new
telecommunications environment." Telecommunications (Americas Edition)
v30, n8 (Aug 1996):22 for the trials of the NTIA agency in the Clinton
administration.
17. McGarvey, Joe. "Intranets, NT Shape Server Market." SoftBase. Jun 1,
1997.
18. Kornblum, Janet. "Netscape sets source code free." News.Com. March 31,
1998.
19. Moeller, Michael. "Fort Apache: freeware's spirit outshines commercial
products." PC Week v14, n23. June 9, 1997.
20. Glyn Moody. "The Greatest OS That (N)ever Was." Wired. August 1997.
21. Sullivan, Eamonn "Freedom is priceless, even when it's free." PC Week
v13, n47. Nov 25, 1996.
22. Saletan, Wiliam "Microsoft plays dead." Slate January 29, 1999.
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